Recommendations
Books Like Mauprat
Best books to read after Mauprat by George Sand
Readers drawn to Mauprat's Gothic romance, its feminist analysis of male education, and Sand's democratic vision will find Indiana and Valentine as companions and the tradition of the Gothic romance about male transformation.
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Indiana
by George Sand
The companion Sand novel and the one that establishes the feminist argument Mauprat develops in Gothic form — Indiana is the realistic social analysis of female constraint; Mauprat is the Gothic romance that imagines what male education into female-defined virtue might look like; reading both together gives the full range of Sand's early feminist vision.
- 2Buy
Jane Eyre
by Charlotte Brontë
The English companion in the tradition of the Gothic romance about a woman who refuses to accept constraint — Jane Eyre's principled resistance to Rochester's attempts to define her on his own terms is the English version of Edmée's principled resistance to Bernard in Mauprat; Charlotte Brontë read Sand, and the parallel between the two novels is the most direct connection between French Romantic and English Victorian feminist fiction.
- 3Buy
Wuthering Heights
by Emily Brontë
The companion Gothic romance in the tradition of the brutal hero whose violence is entangled with authentic passion — Heathcliff's destructive intensity is the unreformed version of what Bernard de Mauprat might have remained without Edmée's principled education; the comparison between Sand's transformation narrative and Brontë's tragedy of unreformed passion defines the range of the Romantic Gothic response to male brutality.
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La Mare au Diable
by George Sand
The pastoral companion in the same Berry landscape — where Mauprat is set in the Gothic ruined castle of the feudal Mauprat family, La Mare au Diable is set in the farms and fields of the same Berry countryside fifteen years later; both novels use the Berry landscape to make arguments about what authentic feeling looks like against different social backgrounds, one Gothic and feudal, the other pastoral and republican.
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The Mystery of Edwin Drood
by Charles Dickens
The Dickens companion in the Gothic tradition of the male violence that threatens an innocent woman — Drood's unfinished Gothic mystery about Edwin's disappearance and John Jasper's obsession is the closest Dickens comes to the Gothic romance tradition that Mauprat exemplifies; both novels use Gothic conventions to analyze male violence as a social and psychological problem rather than simply an individual failing.
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Mauprat
by George Sand
The Donna Dickenson Oxford World's Classics edition, with its introduction on Sand's feminism and the novel's place in the Gothic romance tradition, is the essential companion to the novel itself — Dickenson's reading of Mauprat as a feminist revision of the Beauty and the Beast story is the most illuminating critical framework for new readers, and her translation is the most accurate available.
- 7Buy
Rebecca
by Daphne du Maurier
The modern Gothic companion in the tradition of the dark house and the woman threatened by the violence of the past — du Maurier's 1938 novel about a young bride haunted by her predecessor at Manderley inherits the Gothic conventions that Mauprat uses (the ruined house, the dark secret, the principled woman against a violent world) and updates them for the twentieth century.
- 8Buy
Valentine
by George Sand
The companion Sand novel that shares Mauprat's Berry setting and its analysis of class and love — where Mauprat uses Gothic form to imagine the transformation of feudal brutality into republican virtue, Valentine uses realistic form to show how the same Berry aristocratic world destroys authentic love through social machinery; the two novels are the Gothic and realistic poles of Sand's analysis of the Berry social world.
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